


Ghosting

by TariSilmarwen



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Humor, Not Canon Compliant, except for a joke or two, some supermartian and spitfire but it's not a main focus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 01:37:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21245372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TariSilmarwen/pseuds/TariSilmarwen
Summary: Miss Martian is learning to phase through walls like her more-famous uncle, and that doesn't bode well for the rest of the team.





	Ghosting

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written during Season One, set after "Terrors".

Artemis patted her hair dry with a towel as she crossed her guest bedroom at Mount Justice. She kind of liked this room; it was spacious and comfortable, certainly bigger than her room at the apartment in Gotham that she shared with her mother. She didn't have a lot of stuff to fill it with but she liked the calm and the quiet and the privacy. Artemis tossed her towel aside and cast her gaze about the room. Where had she dropped her shirt again?

Spotting it on the floor of the closet, Artemis walked over and reached down for it.

As she was straightening up, she came face to face with Miss Martian. That is, Miss Martian's face (and the rest of her head actually) was sticking out from the wall.

"Aaaah!" Artemis yelped, falling backwards over her feet.

"Sorry!" came Miss Martian's immediate apologetic squeak. "Sorry! I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to barge in on you while you were half-dressed!"

Artemis put a hand to her heart and took a few deep breaths. The adrenaline jolt caused by Miss Martian's unexpected appearance was starting to wear off. She was immensely thankful that M'gann had only caught her with her top off, in her bra and pants instead of completely naked. That would've been embarrassing.

There was a moment's silence from her closet and then M'gann's voice piped up hesitantly. "Um... can you give me a hand? I think I'm stuck," she said, tone sheepish.

Artemis got to her feet, setting aside her shirt for the moment, and stepped into the closet. Half of Miss Martian's torso was sticking awkwardly out of the left wall, while the rest of her appeared to be trapped inside it. Artemis analyzed the situation a moment, then grabbed one of M'gann's hands, slid an arm around her torso, and pulled. After a brief sensation like trying to pull a stick out of thick mud, the rest of Miss Martian came free from the wall and the two girls yelped and toppled to the floor in a heap. Miss Martian was the first to recover, rising shakily to her feet.

"Thanks," she said breathlessly.

"What were you doing in there?" asked Artemis as she got up, picked up her shirt and started pulling it over her head.

"Practicing my phasing!" the Martian girl explained. Her red eyes sparkled with excitement. "I finally managed to make myself intangible and I was trying to get from the hanger bay to my room, but... I guess I misjudged the distance again."

Artemis straightened her shirt hem and swept a few stray strands of damp hair back over her shoulder. "Again?" she asked, raising her eyebrow in an interested 'Please continue' gesture.

"The first time, I wound up inside the computer banks in the combat simulator." M'gann made a grimace. "It was a bit of a squeeze to get out through the access panel. And then the next time I came up in the pool."

"Well, at least you're getting closer to your target with each try," Artemis joked with a wry smile. M'gann's room was about two floors above hers.

"Yeah. Sorry again about dropping in on you," the Martian girl apologized once more. "I'll go now. But through the door this time, I don't think I want to get stuck in another wall." Miss Martian smiled and started to head for Artemis's door.

Artemis touched her shoulder, bringing her to a brief halt. A sudden, slightly worried expression was now on the archer's face. "This isn't going to be a reoccurring thing, is it?" Artemis asked nervously. Not that she didn't like talking to M'gann or anything but there were certain, ah... "activities" she got up to in this room that she'd rather keep private.

"Huh? Oh, no no, not at all," Miss Martian quickly assured her. A little less certainly she went on, "At least... I mean..." One of her hands drifted up to rub the back of her head. "I'll _try_ not to do it again." She offered Artemis a hopeful smile. "I do need the practice though."

"...Right," Artemis said, voice strained. A weak, painful-looking smile appeared on her face, Artemis trying very hard to look cheerful. "Okay! Well, good luck with your practicing!" She pushed M'gann gently towards the door. "Tell me when you've got a handle on it."

The Martian girl waved appreciatively at her as she exited. "Thanks Artemis!" she gushed. "I will!"

As the door closed behind her, Artemis vowed mentally to herself to spend a _lot _more time away from the Cave.

-YJ-

Over the next several days, Artemis was barely glimpsed at the hideout, which made Wally intensely suspicious as he'd come to the (logically reasoned, he thought) conclusion that she was avoiding him, deliberately denying him the opportunity to brag about beating her in training the week before. Soon however, he and the others learned the _real_ reason for her extended absence, as M'gann started turning up in odd places and inconvenient times in her phasing practice. Then they surreptitiously started following Artemis's example, making themselves as scarce as possible whenever the alien girl trained. (It was a little difficult to do as she frequently forgot to announce when she would be practicing, thus occasional surprise encounters were inevitable.) Miss Martian didn't mind their absence too much, but she found it harder to extract herself from the walls without help. Once she'd spent almost a whole half-hour pinched between the kitchen and the hall and only managed to escape when Superboy heard her frustrated crying from outside and came in and pulled her free.

But slowly, slowly, she was getting better. She could push more easily through a wall now, and it didn't hurt as much trying to walk afterwards. Something that really helped was hovering in place and focusing on making herself intangible first, and _then_ ghosting through solid objects. She'd found this method much easier than pressing on a wall and then trying to shove through. She mentioned this to Wally once and he went off on a tangent about physics and conservation of momentum and force and resistance that M'gann didn't really pay attention to, too busy seeing if she could poke just her hand through a cabinet door to grab a mug. (She'd gotten stuck, of course, but had managed to extract her arm before Wally finished his discourse.)

She was in the gym now, sitting cross-legged on a mat with her eyes closed, focusing on becoming intangible again.

_It seemed like it went faster when I concentrated on how it felt to be immaterial_, she observed to herself. _Maybe I should try that again._

She cleared her mind and thought about the weightless, airy feeling ghosting gave her.

_It was like floating... or like being underwater... having no substance... nothing but air... ether... lightness..._

As she thought it, she started to feel it, started to feel like she had no weight at all and was just a breath of cloud that could be blown away at any—

She yelped and fell through the floor, solidifying again on the other side, and dropped, startled, right into Superboy's lap. Conner had been sitting on the couch, remote in hand, watching TV. He didn't even twitch at her surprise presence, just raised an eyebrow at her, mostly unruffled. (He'd gotten used to her randomly dropping in on him unexpectedly.)

M'gann felt a blush rising on her cheeks. "Heh," she squeaked. "Hi."

Conner smiled at her, bemused. "I take it practice is going well?" he joked.

"In a manner of speaking..." she murmured.

-YJ-

Once she'd gotten the hang of making herself intangible and able to phase through the walls, the trick then became to control her flight path. Flying while intangible was way different from regularly flying. There was no air resistance, so her speed was greatly increased, which made her steering a little difficult to adjust. Rooms would pass in a dizzying blur as she did her best to slow her momentum and come to a stop. She had almost as little control over where she ended up as she'd had when she'd first started practicing. Which didn't bode well for the team's privacy. Despite her best efforts to avoid her teammates' guest rooms (and _their_ best efforts not to be caught off guard by her randomly popping in), she often found herself glimpsing her fellow heroes in... less than flattering situations. During the next three days she periodically caught her friends half-dressed, or in their underwear (Artemis was particularly indignant and embarrassed about that), or in the middle of having serious conversations with each other, or taking a leak, or warbling Britney Spears songs off-key to themselves (Wally made her promise _never_ to tell anyone about that one)... Once she even caught Robin without his mask on.

"Gah! M'gann, don't look!" he shrieked, slapping his gloved hand over his eyes and shooing her out of the room immediately, his thoughts agitated. "Batman would _kill me_ if I let someone else know my civilian identity!"

"But I wouldn't even recognize your civilian identity..." M'gann protested as the Boy Wonder grabbed her by the arm and led her off.

"A good point, I agree, but try telling _him_ that. It would only end in disaster, heavy on the dis," he told her.

She didn't quite understand why Batman would be so uptight about people seeing Robin's face. She thought he had really nice blue eyes. But she made it a point to close her own eyes whenever she accidentally dropped on Robin after that, out of respect.

_...Maybe I should keep my eyes closed __**every**__ time I phase,_ Miss Martian thought the next day, upon emerging in the bathroom and seeing entirely more of Aqualad than she'd ever wanted to in her life. Kaldur was remarkably patient and understanding as she stood there stammering out apologies, certain her green skin had turned completely red. And just smiled at her and wrapped a towel around himself, oddly and infinitely less embarrassed about the situation than M'gann was. All she could do was stare numbly at the floor in mortification.

Kaldur moved aside so she could get to the door, gently cautioning her to be more careful next time.

"And please," he said with a knowing gleam in his eye, "if you would, refrain from using this aspect of your powers to spy on Conner in this same manner."

Now she _knew_ she'd turned red all over.

-YJ-

Something that helped her know when to stop and solidify again was counting the number of open spaces she passed through. The hanger to the library had four "spaces" (two halls, two rooms). Her room to Superboy's had one and a half (a hallway and a storage closest). The library to the kitchen had five. And so on. Counting when she felt open air around her aided her in slowing down, gaining control of her flight before she overshot her destination. The team had had less surprise visits from her since she'd started using that method.

_Two... three... four... five..._ Miss Martian counted in her head, heading up through floors and ceilings towards the kitchen to make dinner for everyone. She was thinking mashed potatoes, stewed vegetables, chicken breast in a creamy sauce, and maybe some rolls on the side. _I hope I have enough pepper. Oh and I forgot to empty the dishwasher after lunch so I'll have to__—wait,_ she thought, slowing down slightly. _Was that seven or eight?_ She counted on her hands as she continued to drift upwards. _That was seven, I think_. _Eight... nine... ten!_

She came to a stop. Looking around, however, she saw that she was still inside a wall.

_Did I miscount?_ she worried to herself.

She took a tentative step forward and then breathed a sigh of relief as she phased through shelves and cans and stepped into the clear in the kitchen's pantry. Her relief was short-lived when she realized the door was already open.

_That's odd_, she thought. She stepped out into the kitchen, immediately spying Kid Flash with a large jar under his arm, from which he was scarfing down a batch of _her_ lemon-meringue cookies.

"Wally!" she cried in dismay, her tone slightly hurt. "It was _you_ who's been sneaking handfuls of my cookies from the pantry?"

The speedster's eyes were wide with a classic—and guilty—deer in the headlights look, at having been literally caught with his hand in the cookie jar. The only thing she picked up from his mind was a long string of _'Ohcrapohcrapohcrapoh_—'

A trickle of crumbs dropped from his mouth as he swallowed nervously and stammered, "I... I can explain!"

-YJ-

Two days later, M'gann's insides were threatening to burst with happiness. She'd done it finally! She'd finally mastered her phasing! She was so proud of herself, and she knew her uncle J'onn would be proud too. She hadn't been able to get ahold of him yet though, he wasn't currently at the Watchtower. And she was _dying_ to tell someone. She looked around for Superboy and found him in the boiler room, playing fetch with Wolf. He was elated for her, of course, and spun her around in his arms in congratulations.

"Should we... go out and celebrate or something?" he asked uncertainly once the initial excitement died down.

"That sounds like a great idea," she reassured him. Her eyes lit up. "Oooh! I'll go see if Artemis wants to join us!"

"Okay."

Almost before he'd finished saying it, she was off, breezing through the Cave unimpeded, the steel and rock like so much vaporous mist to her. It was an amazing sensation. She felt so free, so uninhibited! She could go anywhere! She'd never be trapped by anything! She'd never need to use doors ever again!

In her excitement she almost missed the count to the hallway outside Artemis's room. Skidding to an awkward halt in the air, she reoriented herself and flew towards the door.

"Artemis!" she called as, not even bothering to knock, she passed through the door like it wasn't even there. (Phasing was the best kind of transportation _ever_, she decided.) "Artemis, I did it! I've mastered my phasing! I—Oh..." She trailed off abruptly at the sight that met her eyes. "...Um..."

A furiously blushing Wally and Artemis broke apart from their kiss and scooted as far away from each other on the bed as they could. Wally stuttered out something incomprehensible. Artemis couldn't even make eye-contact, choosing instead to stare down at her boots.

"Megan! Hey," Wally finally managed to choke, eyes shifting, face quite resembling his hair at that point. "We were just—I mean we weren't—you know—and—I mean—you really should knock—and uh—we're actually not—that is—uh..."

He fell quiet.

A moment of extremely awkward silence passed.

M'gann looked from the archer to the speedster and back again. "Should I... leave you two alone or something?" she asked, sensing the flustered tenor of their thoughts.

"That'd be nice," Wally admitted weakly. "And uh... if you could like... not mention this to anyone? Like that other thing?"

"I should have knocked first, shouldn't I?"

Artemis put her face in her hands. "For future reference, M'gann..." she groaned through her fingers, "...just because you _can_ phase through the door..."

"Right," she hastily agreed, already starting to back out of the room. "I'll just... go now," she said, quickly phasing back out into the hallway.

...On second thought, conventional means of transportation were just as nice.


End file.
